Holy invasion of privacy, Batman!!!

[Systematic Chaos]

There was a thread in GD, which I think got deleted due to profanity concerns, about a site called (screw)hotmail.com (you'll have to type in the REAL URL yourselves, sorry). Anyway, the point to this site is that by signing up, you can have e-mail with the (screw)hotmail address forwarded to your main inbox. Cool idea, and I went ahead and signed up. But then, I went to the homepage for the site and in the links on the left side was this (and again, the link is bad due to editing out the profanity. Use your imagination and repair the URL yourselves. :)

TO REPEAT: THIS LINK IS INTENTIONALLY BAD DUE TO PROFANITY. Use your imagination and change it to make it work.

http://www.(screw)microsoft.com/content/ms-hidden-files.shtml

I don't know if what they're saying is true of Windows XP, but I would imagine it is somehow. Is this not the scariest thing? I thought I would bring this to everyone's attention and I hope some of you can make good use of the information contained therein.

On edit: Okay, the original post is still around, it's just fallen way down the list and I didn't go far enough to find it before. Here it is:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=105&topic_id=321702

[TreasonousBastard]

1. Oh, yeah, that...

Riddler's been around for a while, and has some interesting things to say, if he does get a bit hysterical sometimes.

XP phones home, and is designed to do that. Scary and annoying, and it's getting worse. Apple seems to be pretty healthy lately, and Macs just may be the way to go. And Linux when it gets simple enough for Grandma to use.

Win9x and it's variants have that damn index file that they try to hide, but you can see it if you look the right way. You can't erase it through Windoze-- it either won't delete, or it fakes you out and just the name disappears, but it's still there.

MS sez it doesn't do anything, but won't tell anyone what it doesn't do or why it's so important to have it there.

I use Steganos Internet Trace Destructor to kill all that stuff, including the cache files and crap Windows sets up even if I use Mozilla or Opera for browsing.